When you start Cafu, it internally starts a client and a server, then connects to itself when a new map is loaded.
This is done even for pure single-player games, and thus your Windows or Personal Firewall reports that Cafu.exe
is establishing a network connection.
Therefore, please set your firewall to not block Cafu from network access.
If you do not plan to host a Cafu game server or join a Cafu internet game, there is of course no harm in blocking access from and to the internet for Cafu.exe
, but for single-player games, basic access to the local network is required.
If you see an initialization error similar to the one in the image to the right, the most frequent cause is that the drivers for your sound or graphics hardware are outdated or incomplete (e.g. missing an OpenGL implementation). Please install or update the drivers for your hardware first, then try again.
If that doesn't help, run Cafu.exe
from the command prompt with the -log console.txt
option. For example:
> Cafu.exe -log console.txt
The contents of the newly generated file console.txt
might give you a clue about why the initialization error occurred. If it doesn't, please post both the error message and the contents of the console.txt
file at our forum or mailing-lists.
Note that you can run
> Cafu.exe --help
to see a list of all available command line options. They might be useful to work around the problem, and if you post at the forums, we might ask you to try some of them to further narrow the problem down.
Here are some features of OpenGL that made us choose it as the main rendering API:
You may also find this blog message interesting.
In normal operation, the Cafu engine provides state-of-the-art image quality that is achieved by employing the latest methods in rendering technology. However, if the image quality is lower than you expected or not as good as shown in the reference screenshots at the Cafu website, these are the common causes for reduced image quality:
During the past few years, many people have become used to use 3D engines that employ relatively old rendering technologies on relatively new graphics accelerator boards. This combination, observed in games like Counter-Strike, Quake3 and similar, achieved impressive frame-rates (often a hundred FPS and more) and fluid display updates.
The difference with Cafu is that Cafu employs dynamic, per-pixel lighting and shadows. The underlying rendering techniques are much more sophisticated than previous rendering methods, and relatively new. Despite a thoroughly optimized implementation, these techniques inherently cause lower frame-rates than older the techniques. In fact, if you compare Cafu to comparable 3D engines that are in the same category (only very few are, like Doom3), Cafu beats surprisingly well. ;)
There are many factors that have an effect on rendering performance. You can tweak some of them in order to manipulate the frame-rate, but the actual change in frame-rate much depends on your computer system and its components. Some of the suggestions below may even have no observable effect on your system at all. This is because every system has a different bottle-neck, and only finding and removing the bottle-neck yields the greatest effect.
Here is a list of options and suggestions that might help with the performance. You may simply try them out, and see what works best for your system. However, please note that most of these options will buy you faster rendering at the cost of decreased image quality.
cl_maxLights
console variable to 0
. This can be done in the game console or by putting the statementcl_maxLights=0;
into your config.lua
file.
When Cafu is run from the command-line, it is also possible to specify a renderer DLL that makes use of less graphics features. For example, you might try the OpenGL 1.2 renderer in order to increase the FPS:
C:\Cafu-9.06> Cafu.exe -clRenderer ..\Libs\build\win32\vc8\release\MaterialSystem\RendererOpenGL12.dll